A pastor or ministry leader can give years to discipleship. They prepare lessons carefully, meet people over coffee, pray for them by name and rebuild the group ministry when it stalls. Some people grow, and that is a real joy. But many of the people they have invested in most seem to live much as they did before. Over time the disappointment can settle into something heavier: weariness, self-doubt or a quiet impatience with the people they set out to serve.
That frustration is understandable, and much of it comes from caring about the right thing. Leaders want to see people become more like Christ, and Scripture gives them every reason to want it. The frustration deepens when that longing carries an assumption with it: that if the leader does the work well enough, change in other people should follow.
When Paul Could Bear It No Longer
Paul had been forced to leave the young church in Thessalonica after only a short time, and the believers there were facing pressure he could do nothing about from a distance. He later wrote to them:
“That is why, when I could bear it no longer, I sent Timothy to find out whether your faith was still strong. I was afraid that the tempter had gotten the best of you and that our work had been useless.”
1 Thessalonians 3:5, NLT
When Timothy returned with good news that their faith was holding, Paul wrote, “It gives us new life to know that you are standing firm in the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 3:8, NLT). A leader who longs to know whether people are growing is in good company.
Paul did two things with that concern. He kept teaching them, and he prayed for what he could not produce himself. “And may the Lord make your love for one another and for all people grow and overflow, just as our love for you overflows,” he wrote (1 Thessalonians 3:12, NLT). He asked God to make their hearts “strong, blameless, and holy” (3:13). Paul held the goal clearly, a people growing in love and holiness, and he looked to God to bring it about.
What the Frustration Can Be Carrying
Looked at closely, a leader’s frustration often holds several things at once.
Part of it is love: the right goal, held deeply. That part is worth keeping.
Part of it may be a weight that was never the leader’s to carry. A leader is responsible for faithfulness in what God has given them to do: teaching, caring, praying, leading. But each believer must respond to God personally, and much of God’s work in a person happens where no one else can see it, the leader included. No method, however good, gives a leader control over what God is doing in someone else. Setting that weight down leaves the goal as high as ever and returns it to God’s hands, where Paul placed it.
And part of the frustration may be pointing at something real. Often the people who seem unchanged hear the teaching, agree with it and want to live it. What they are missing is help bringing it into the conversations, pressures and habits where it would make a difference. In that case, the discrepancy has a cause that can be understood, and understanding it changes what a leader looks for.
Carrying It Differently
When a leader keeps Paul’s goal and his dependence on God, the frustration can change shape. It can prompt a closer look. Where are people getting stuck between what they know and how they live? What would help them bring God’s Word into those places?
It can also become less lonely. The burden was never meant to rest on one person. Much of the help believers need can come from other believers who meet with them around God’s Word, ask how it is going and keep encouraging them. That takes no title or special training. Part of a leader’s work is making room for that help, rather than carrying it all alone.
The Question Underneath
In the end, a leader’s frustration often comes back to one question: why can people who hear the truth, believe it and genuinely want to live it still find that it is not yet shaping their everyday lives? That question is the subject of The Gap. Starting from James’s picture of someone who looks in a mirror and then walks away, it explains from Scripture why hearing the truth and living it are distinct, and where God’s work and our response meet.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
